Money 20/20: What’s driving fintech forward?

Money 20/20 brings together innovators across the financial playing field to spark insightful discussions and break down what the future of finance will look like.

With 15 different tracks on a variety of topics, Money 20/20 can seem a little overwhelming. To help you navigate the conference and focus on what’s important, we parsed all of the content and identified the two prevalent themes that seem to be guiding how fintech as an industry is evolving in 2018: automation and customer focus.

Theme 1: Fintechs are automating tasks to make finance frictionless and easy

Fintechs found their initial success in taking an aspect of the financial experience (saving, investing, lending, etc.) and making it much easier for the customer. Robo advisors took the complicated aspect of picking one’s portfolio and made it as easy as rounding up every purchase you make. Personal financial management ( PFM) apps made it easy to view your whole financial picture instead of having five different tabs open, trying to reconcile among them.

As fintech markets saturate from competition, innovative companies are looking for new ways to automate even more of their user’s financial lives to make it even easier to manage one’s finances. AI is driving auto-pilot style features across different product types.

This manifests differently from vertical to vertical:

Robo Advisors

Robo advisors are taking their easy-to-use investing philosophy and applying it across other verticals, from retirement to banking. By re-powering their investment engines into banking they are making it easier for millions of customers to start taking steps towards a brighter financial future.

Banking Apps

Banking applications are starting to apply artificial intelligence to better KYC their users and create more personalized, proactive applications that tailor to the user’s specific needs.

Alternative Lenders

Alternative lenders are automating even more of the underwriting process and fraud management, making lending faster and more efficient and enabling them to provide loans to individuals that would have been ignored by traditional FICO-dependent lenders.

PFM

PFM apps are aggregating more niche aspects of the user’s financial lives (auto, home, retirement, etc.) and bringing in all of a user’s bills and enabling transactional functionality so their users don’t have to go all over the place to manage their cash flow.

Savings Apps

Savings apps are making saving easier than ever before with goal-based savings that run on “if this then that” type functionality. Set it, forget it, and meet your goal.

If you want to learn more about this at Money 20/20, check out talks like:

Theme 2: Fintechs are making their apps even more customer-centric

It’s no secret – part of fintech’s widespread success lies in its ability to listen to its customers and adapt quickly to its customers’ ever evolving needs. Traditionally, finance has had a fairly slow rate of evolution, but with the advent of modern fintech, that rate of acceleration has dramatically increased. Today, fintechs are realizing that success is defined by the customer and fintech will soon be a survival of the fittest, where those that differentiate and successfully solve their customers’ needs will leave competitors in the dust.

As you make your way through the conference this year, pay attention to how different industries are tackling their users’ problems and ask yourself, how can I serve my customer even better than I do today? Focus on the customer first and the revenues will come – focus solely on revenues first and you’ll find yourself losing customers to those that took the other path.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet as to what we’re seeing in the industry:

Robo Advisors

Robo Advisors’ customers are asking for more of the experiences they’ve come to know and love. As new robo apps continue to pop up, those that are successful will be those that create a frictionless experience for their users and make other aspects (like banking, retirement) as easy as they’ve made investing. Gone are days of silo-ed applications; robos are going horizontal.

Lenders

Lenders are focused on two key things, speed and accessibility. As lenders have found success in innovating on the application process, they’re now looking to the remaining points of friction: customer reach and funds deployment. By partnering with other channels to make their products more accessible and working with solutions like Cambr to instantly fund loans, they’re making it even easier to get a loan that will power you towards your financial goals.

PFM

PFMs found success in becoming the one-stop-shop for their customers to see their finances but struggle when it comes to user retention. Their customers are resoundingly asking for the same thing: to become transactional. Today, more and more PFMs are looking to add deposit functionality so they can go from a “window” into the user’s life to a fully operational financial hub.

If you want to learn more about this at Money 20/20, check out talks like:

Designing a fintech from scratch, starting with the customer

Next-level digital gifting: enhancing the customer experience

New frontiers in credit risk scoring for a customer-centric era

You know my name, look up the number: building brand narratives

It’s what the customer perceives you do that matters

We hope you’re as excited as we are to get under the hood and see all that Money 20/20 has to offer. If you want to talk about any of the above themes, have questions about what you’re seeing at Money 20/20, or want to learn how you can add banking to automate your business, engage your customers, and solve more of your customer’s needs, click the button below and we’ll set up a time to chat.